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Mark Abent is back with another exciting episode of Bugsmashers, check it out!

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

The bug: When going into the cockpit of a ship, the pilots weapons clip through the arms and legs in transition and when idle.

Mark shows off some of the inner thought system which allows a player to choose multiple actions from a single button instead of pressing F and not knowing what you specifically you chose.

Mark wrote a script that allows animators to hide the weapons during certain parts of the animation and later on will have a smooth res in and out effect for weapons disappear and reappear during animations.

Full Transcript

Mark Abent (MA): Hey everyone, welcome to Bugsmashers. Today we’re going on the other side, the right side… [Stares off into the distance while mingling with his fingers]

Hey everyone. We are here in the awesome test level again, and I have down that Hornet from last week which were using to test out the new item system and it has some fun little red balls because well, things break, but that’s actually some of the items. I think that’s the shield and that’s the cooler.

So let’s plop down, and unlike last time where I had a little debug text on the top, we’re now using the inner thought system, and this bug is, when I get inside, my weapons which you can see on the player are actually still visible and clipping through geometry.

So what the animation guys wanted, was a way to turn on and off, at least the models so when you plop in the game, your models basically just vanish and then when you get back out, they appear again.

So, let’s turn off the freecam and let’s enter the seat and see what it looks like with the models.

So as my guy climbs up, you can see the guns right on him, they clip through everything and they clipped through his hands and his legs. Alright, so if we leave the game, hop into the code. So what I have done, is I created this new bit of code called a prop clip and what it does is it allows the animators to basically specify if something should be shown, hidden, or just keep the state as it is, and if they’re playing an animation and we have an enter and exit state, so if we’re playing an animation and we enter it, we may want to hide the weapon, but not necessarily show it again after the animation is done because we may have another set of animations. So whenever an animation plays to show the weapon, then they can set it accordingly.

So what I did in my test is anytime I play the idle animation which is right here, it plays all these fun little animations for G-forces and Look IK and it will actually play this procedural clip which will, when the animation plays, it will hide our weapons and when we leave the exit, it will show the weapons, but again the animators if they want to get rid of this and change it any which way so, you know as you’re climbing up in the enter, it hides it, and then when you sit down it’s still hidden and then when you get out of your seat, during some animation it plays.

So these are the params, so basically all this fancy dancy stuff right here gets set up in this spot and then this is the actual procedural clip and as you can see when you enter, we set our states and we update the weapon visibility when we both enter and exit, and what we do js depending on if we show our hide we tell the player suit manager, “Hey, do we want to hide our weapons” and what this guy does in the player suit manager, it actually goes through all the item ports that we have, and if they’re weapons or gizmos, it will basically hide all the ports and any sub ports. So all your magazines, extended attachments will be hidden and then once this gets triggered again we’ll make all that visible.

So before I had this code disabled to show you guys what it was before, and now I re enable it and re code everything. Ah recode, recode awesome! And recode finished

So if we plop down in the game, open up our ladder, open up our canopy and of course just for a sneak peek, you don’t to do this one, you could actually hold F and select some other interactions. So I could actually open up the co-pilot canopy. Alright so let’s enter, quickly turn in our free cam. As you can see, our weapons there and as soon as we play the idle animation, poof, it’s gone.

Then if I turn off freecam, we’ll disable, oops, wrong thing. We’ll leave the seat and what do you know, our weapons are back, clipping through everything. So of course they have to get tuned and I hit a button to leave the seat. So of course this will have to get tuned by the animators so that it’ll turn them on and off at key frames of the animation, but for now this works for fun little tests and I’m sure sometime in the future we’ll have a nice little res in and res out effect so it just won’t go, [Makes a pop in and pop out effect with his hands] but, for now it just vanishes.

Hope you guys enjoyed and [whispers] pow pow..

So we had a little fun bug with our new item system where, if you go up on the ladder and you sit down, your weapons all clip through everything. That’s actually happening right now in the current game, but we wanted a way to address that and since we have a whole bunch of wide ranges of cockpits and all crazy things it’s going to be hard to hide them, especially when you have big suits and small suits and all that fun. So what we decided to do was res out the weapons. When you get down into the seat and depending upon what area of the animation you’re in, we’ll show and hide them, and so we added a little prop clip to make it so the animators could do that and now we just have to add in the res in and res out effect and we’re good to go. Hope you guys enjoyed, till next time.

A polite Canadian who takes pride in making other peoples day brighter. He enjoys waffles with Maplesyrup, making delicious puns and striving for perfection in screaming at the T.V. during hockey games.